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Andy Grove survived both the Nazis and the Communists to become the quintessential American capitalist. Even more important, he is the best role model we have for doing business in the twenty-first century.

Any short list of the world's most admired business people would include Andy Grove, the chairman and CEO of Intel in its years of explosive growth. During his career, Intel became the model for Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley became the model for the world. And Grove became Time's Man of the Year-an icon of the promise of the American life.

The simple facts of Grove's career are the stuff of legend. Born in Hungary of Jewish origin in 1936, he survived the Holocaust only to face the Soviet invasion. He escaped to New York, penniless, at age twenty, and embraced America, transforming himself from Andrs Istvn Grf into Andrew Stephen Grove. After putting himself through college and graduate school, he arrived in Silicon Valley at the perfect time for an ambitious young engineer. He joined Intel at its founding in 1968, rose to CEO in 1987, then led the company into the stratosphere, with compound annual profit growth at 34 percent for the next eleven years.

Despite decades of media scrutiny and six of Grove's own books, there remains a powerful element of mystery about him. This definitive biography, by a Harvard Business School professor with unprecedented access, finally cracks the code of who Andy Grove really is, how his mind works, how he attacks impossible problems, and how he leads others to exceed their own expectations of themselves.

After extensive and meticulous research, Richard S. Tedlow has produced the most complete picture ever of this fascinating, colorful, often brilliant but sometimes maddening business genius.

The most consistent and important theme of Grove's life is how he responds to change: boldly, quickly, with every scrap of his intelligence but no respect for conventional wisdom. As Tedlow observes, "Grove has escaped natural selection by doing the evolving himself. Forcibly adapting himself to a succession of new realities, he has left a trail of discarded assumptions in his wake. When reality has changed, he has found a way to let go and embrace the new."

Some of the insights in Andy Grove include: * How Grove's traumatic youth shaped both his personality and his approach to business and led to his signature phrase-"Only the Paranoid Survive." * How he studied human dynamics and taught himself to become a great manager, developing such formulations as "strategic inflection point," "knowledge power trumps position power," "constructive confrontation," and others. * How his complex relationships evolved with the legendary cofounders of Intel, Gordon Moore and Bob Noyce. * Why he stumbled during the Pentium crisis of 1994, and how he parlayed it into a reinvigorated concept of ingredient branding ("Intel Inside").

Tedlow, an acclaimed business historian, interviewed dozens of people and examined mountains of documents, with Grove's total cooperation. Yet Grove exercised no editorial control and did not see even one page of the manuscript. This is an unauthorized biography that uniquely illuminates Grove's life, Intel's history, and the rise of Silicon Valley.

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

While reading and then reviewing most of Richard Tedlow's previous books, I was soon convinced that he is a cultural anthropologist as well as a business historian. With consummate skill, he creates a richly textured context within which he analyzes various corporate executives such as Andrew Carnegie, George Eastman, Henry Ford, Robert Noyce, both Thomas J. Watson, Sr. and Jr., Charles Revson, and Sam Walton. His talents are comparable with those of Joseph J. Ellis and David McCullough. As he explains in the introduction to this book, he interviewed dozens of people about the life and times of Andy Grove, asking each "What would make this book a page-turner for you?" Here are three responses:

"I want to know how he thinks."

"I want to know how all these decisions really did get made."

"I want to know all the stuff that he won't tell you about."

Tedlow provides answers to these and other questions as he rigorously examines "the life and times of an American" who was born András István Gróf in Hungary (in 1936), to a middle-class Jewish family. In 1956, during the Hungarian Revolution, he left his home and family under the cover of night, immigrating to the United States, and arriving in New York in 1957. He then earned a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from the City College of New York and then, after settling in California, he received his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 1963. After working at Fairchild Semiconductor, Grove accepted Gordon Moore's invitation to become the third employee at a start-up, Intel Corporation (Integrated Electronics), of which he eventually became president in 1979, its CEO in 1987, and its chairman and CEO in 1997.Read more ›

In Mukul Pandya and Robbie Shell's profile of the top 25 business leaders today, "Lasting Leadership", they cite one above all others, Intel's CEO Andy Grove. The one chapter on Grove (appropriately entitled "Best of the Best") certainly whet my appetite for Harvard Business School professor and historian Richard Tedlow's full-fledged biography, which turns out to be not only a thoughtful profile of Grove but also a fascinating historical overview of the technology industry. How these two aspects intertwine provides the most provocative parts of the book, in particular, how Grove's visionary acumen anticipated the growing demand for instant information and how the personal computer was to become a mandatory household and office item.

Nonetheless, the more personal story behind Grove will interest many readers since his background reflects a remarkable transformation under the most adverse of circumstances. Born a Jew in 1936 Nazi-occupied Hungary when anti-Semitic laws were being fully enforced, Grove managed to survive not only the Nazi regime but the post-WWII Communist takeover. During the bloody Hungarian Revolution, he left his family and escaped to the U.S. when he was twenty. Penniless, he worked his way to a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Berkeley in 1963. He worked his way up from Fairchild Semiconductors, where they introduced the first integrated circuit, to become the fourth employee of Intel and begin an impressive upward climb.

This is where Tedlow provides sharp insight into Grove's clever navigation though Intel's management structure under co-founders Gordon Moore and Bob Noyce, and more importantly, how Grove became an acknowledged leader in Silicon Valley for his groundbreaking thinking.Read more ›

This is a book that every businessman confronted with the problems of rapid change needs to read. Intel the giant technology company is Andy Grove, and Andy Grove is Intel. More than any other single individual, Grove left his footprint on this company. He started off as Intel's 3rd hire; the first two were Gordon Moore, and Bob Noyce, two other Silicon Valley legends. By the time Grove was finished there were tens of thousands of employees.

You might recall that Gordon Moore, Andy's mentor is the creator of the famous "Moore's Law". There are many variations of Moore's Law, and Moore never called it a law by the way. Essentially it means that the computer power that can be placed on a chip doubles every 18 months, some say 2 years, and the cost drops by half. The law has basically held up since its inception in 1965.

Richard Tedlow, the author is a full Professor at Harvard Business School. He has obviously put his heart and soul into this book. Andy Grove did not read this book until it was finished, and published. He did not want to get into a shoot-out about what was in the book. You might recall that Grove wrote several books himself. One of them had the great title, "Only the Paranoid Survive". I believe this biography is better than the books Grove wrote.

Grove has stated that the author knows more about him, than he knows about himself. Upon reading the book, Grove could not figure out how the author was able to obtain so much information about him. In the end, this is what an author is supposed to do, isn't it? The vital concepts that I took out of Tedlow's writings are:

1) Here's a man that should have died three times before he got to America.Read more ›